#Liza minelli frank sinatra how to
#Liza minelli frank sinatra tv

I think he dreams about his old loves.” Then she was up, hurrying to the road to find a cab to go and rehearse The Ed Sullivan Show. “I found Ocho in the street when I was singing in San Juan, he was all bones and bloody from fighting, I took him right back to the hotel. Don’t they? I had to say, ‘No, Mama, calm down, it’s got nothing to do with you…'”Īnd she hugged the grizzled head of Ocho, a grey mutt suspicious of the world who growls continually in half-sleep. “Well, all parents worry about their kids understanding adult sickness. When I got it, I sent the script to Mama in London and she called and said, ‘But why do you want to play this? How could you possibly understand this screwed-up, neurotic girl?'” I had to talk people into giving me work I waited two years for the part in Sterile Cuckoo. It was my idea, and she was, like, busy when I was starting. I guess everybody thinks she got me started. They were just standards, Harold Arlen, like that, the stuff she sang. I used to jam with these musician friends, and one day we rented a studio and recorded three songs, and I gave the record to Mama for her birthday. The singing came much later: When I was a teenager. I’d memorize the routines and go home and rehearse them in front of a mirror for literally hours. Terrific! And Daddy would let me ride on the camera boom with him.īut what I really dug was the dance rehearsals: Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly. “Because I sort of grew up at MGM, it was a fantastic playground, I knew every inch of it, all the underground passages to the sound stages. She spoke of Gar-land tentatively: “Dancing, it came first with me, y’know?” She would smile a lot then, as she talked. Then, as now (though no one near her ever fully acknowledges it) her mother’s ghost (Garland was then still alive, or apparently so) passed continually through her body, eyes, inflection like a hurried guest.

She was coltish, disarming her movie, The Sterile Cuckoo, was still unreleased, but she has begun what you sensed she sensed would be a spectacular career. To get acquainted, we’d met to have lunch in the park, both wearing protective glasses, though the sky was dirty cotton when the sun came out we took the glasses off. Then, though, there was a subtle urgency about her, an under-cutting apprehension, and her nails were pathetically ragged. She had believed, too, in her serenity four years before, sitting cross-legged on the new grass in Central Park. Not really asking a question, Liza says, “Do you believe it!”Ĭlearly, she does, though she has always seemed to believe implicitly in her immediate circumstances, as do most actors: For them all, the life-movie shoots perpetually, each new setup is as convincing as the last.

#Liza minelli frank sinatra tv

“I was really shocked with myself, yesterday, the cashier didn’t know the price of my paper towels, and I said, ‘Uh, 39, they went up.’ I said that, me!” Turning to the glass deck door, she regards the dark, boyish source of all this serenity, quite ordinary in his chinos and parka: the $50 million TV baby, Desiderio Alberto Arnaz IV, whose birth in January, 1953, bumped the Eisenhower Inauguration from the headlines, and who, at this moment, is throwing bread scraps to a dozen circling gulls. Oh, sometimes ladies do point, and come up and say hello. Also, they’re great equalizers: You’re all just women on common ground in there. I found that supermarkets are really convenient.

#Liza minelli frank sinatra how to

Paper towels? Liza May, who’d order caviar from the deli if the dog’s stomach growled? “Oh yeah, but to run a real household well,” she asserts primly, “you gotta figure, um, how to do things fastest and cheapest, so it won’t put tsouris on your head. Gently, she speaks of supermarkets and paper towels. She notes that in six days the plants must again be watered that for supper, the sausage must be defrosted, she does not need her secretary or housekeeper to remind her. With a little can, she waters the ferns she has bought to place on the table beside the framed pictures of herself on the covers of Time and Newsweek, to personalize the rented house. Where are the tarantula eyelashes, the chain-smoked Marlboros, Where’s the feverish Liza of Vegas cabarets and Plaza suites? She has been replaced, for now, in the cast, by scrubbed, westernized young matrom, the sort of vigorous semi-rural girl seen tossing Frisbees on the beaches of rustic summer houses like this one, just turned fiery inside by the Malibu sunset. They looked chewed as if by small animals now they are untroubled and her hands, which would explore one another whenever she talked, rest neatly in the lap of her jeans. Once she would snap instantly at her nails. This story was originally published in the issue of Rolling Stone.